Lucius Fox had been quite sincere when he told Selina he
liked “her movie.” That was before he spent an afternoon with her learning how
to think like a super-thief and the rest of the month outsmarting himself as he
maneuvered his way around all the systems he himself had designed. Nothing
feeds a brilliant mind like discovering a new way of thinking, and long after
the high of his first ‘heist’ had run its course, he was still intoxicated by
this practice. He decided he didn’t like the movie much after all and opted to
rent more traditional heist films rather than seeing it a second time. Whoever
made that cat burglar so angry and bitter didn’t grasp what the real Catwoman
did, how good she was at it, and how much fun it was to bob and weave
around the tiny limited minds that make up the systems meant to keep you out.
They certainly didn’t grasp how gratifying it was to be so very good at what you
do, or how hard it would be to maintain a good mad-on if you were the kind of
person who has that much fun on a regular basis.

Not a great movie-watcher, none of this was the sort of
thing Lucius would normally think about, but in this case, he had an ulterior
motive. He wanted another master class with Selina now that he had the
Data-Lock Process 2.0 ready for testing, and he wanted to sit down with
her and go over all the WayneTech internal system security. He had
learned a lot in that one afternoon, but he certainly didn’t feel ready to ‘fly
solo.’ He needed Selina’s continued involvement, and a few pithy words about
the movie would make an ideal icebreaker.

He hadn’t wanted to interrupt when she was occupied with
board members and donors, and he hated the idea of big-footing when she was
chatting with Foundation employees, so he waited until she was dancing with
Bruce.

“Wh…?” Selina had said just as Lucius came up to them.

“Evening,” he smiled. “Selina, you’re looking lovely.
Bruce, do you think I might borrow her for a minute?”

“Absolutely,” Bruce smiled, taking a half-step back but
holding onto Selina’s right hand just long enough to lift it to his lips. “This
isn’t the best place to talk anyway,” he said, grazing her fingers with a gentle
kiss and meeting her astonished eyes with a penetrating Bat-stare. “It’s a
starry night out, we’ll finish up later.”

Lucius was delighted that he didn’t have to use any of his
prepared material. Selina came right out and asked how he had been getting on
since the thieving-tutorial, so it was easy to book her for another afternoon to
‘check his homework,’ as he put it, and he even got her tentative agreement to
meet for a series of working lunches to go over the rest of the Wayne Tech
systems. At the conclusion of their dance, however, as he looked around to turn
her back over to Bruce, it seemed that his boss had disappeared.

“He does that,” Selina noted wryly.

“You’re noticed that too?” Lucius grinned.

“It’s a starry night out.”

There was no question what it meant. Virtually the last
thing he’d said to her as Batman was to “Stay away from that Van Gogh.”
The Museum of Modern Art had announced they were moving their entire collection
out to Queens to be displayed in a temporary facility while the midtown building
underwent a massive renovation. Catwoman was on the roof above to keep an eye
on the art, Batman was there to keep an eye on her… and the roles that had been
subtly but insistently evolving since the Cat-Tales show suddenly evaporated
completely. Without either intending to make a personal revelation, it was
suddenly out there that she didn’t care that much for Monet and they both
preferred the Van Gogh. More intimate exchanges followed, which were followed in
turn by a hasty and determined retreat into their old adversarial roles: “When
they reopen down there, it’s going to be a banquet” and “Stay away from that Van
Gogh.”

By the time the renovation was completed, Bruce and Selina were a couple.
They were a fixture on the social scene, invited to the reopening as a set.
Yet the Bat/Cat history was so present and the associations
with the MoMA so pronounced… “When they reopen, it’s going to be a banquet.
They’ll have a huge party, crème de la crème decked out in their best jewels and
all the new security will be suspect…” The idea of dressing for that party
in the same room was unthinkable. The idea of him coming up behind her and
fastening the jewels she would be
wearing… So they parted for a night, arrived separately, and after putting down
the kind of criminal uproar that leaves so many Gotham events of that kind in a
shambles, they rendezvoused hours later in a dark, empty and war torn gallery in
front of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

The only question was whether “a starry night out” meant to
meet in the gallery in front of the painting or on the roof of the original
encounter. Selina assumed the latter, but she popped inside first to leave a
miniature camera on the bench in front of the Van Gogh, just in case. She got
as far as the third floor panel to disable the second floor cameras when she
caught the shadow shifting in her peripheral vision.

“You’ve already done this, I take it?” she asked just loud
enough to be heard by a looming crimefighter.

“I meant to meet on the roof,” he said. “Came down here to
keep an eye on that panel in case you misunderstood.”

“The roof was my guess,” she smirked. “I was going to
plant a camera downstairs, just in case.”

Batman’s lip twitched. She took a step towards him, and
his lip twitched again as she touched the emblem on the center of his chest,
delicately tracing over the scallops of the right batwing as her own lips curled
into a smile.

“You’ve started to think in contingencies,” said Batman.

“I always did, just not the same kind as you.” Another
slow, silent scallop-trace, and then… “Roof? It is a starry night out,
I’m told.”

A few minutes later, Batman walked the perimeter of the
block glass roof, assuring himself there was no suspicious activity in the area
that required his attention. Catwoman double-checked the sightlines, and then
met him in the southeast corner on a favorite spot, where they could look
through the clear floor, down into a row of Warhols and Lichtensteins.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he answered.

She looked confused. She waited for a minute, but the only
response was another lip twitch.

“It’s your meeting,” she reminded him. “We left off at
‘you’ve been expecting it.’”

“Of course. You don’t have any idea at all what’s going
on, not even a theory or a guess?” She knew the tone from their first ‘date
night’ team-ups. He had this way about him when he tried to coax her into being
a detective. “Think about when it started, this ‘poking around’ in your past.
The timing of it.”

“It’s not the movie; Barbara and I eliminated that first
thing. The stuff they’re looking at is all wrong for that.”

“Agreed. So what are they looking at: France, Italy,
fashion. What does that imply about the person or persons doing the searching?”

“They know how to pronounce Ibiza, so what?”

“They know you know how to pronounce Ibiza. They
know you, Selina. It’s not ‘fashion’ in general they’re looking at, but Fashion
Week, the specific tents you went to. Given their ability to
pinpoint actual dresses, I’d say they watched video from the runways where the
audience was visible and noted
which numbers you jotted down. That’s how I’d go about it.”

“Bruce, I get that you’ve got that whole Sherlock thing
going where you, obnoxiously and presumptuously, treat me like a Watson-Robin
that you’re training to think like a detective. Got news for you.
Three pages before all that deduction stuff in the Detective’s Handbook is a
technique I happen to know is a personal favorite of yours: Ask somebody who knows.
And if they’re evasive, you make a fist and ask agai—”

“You’re being profiled.”

She blinked. Then:

“… Uhlhm… Come again?”

“You’re on the list. Have been since—You’re right, it has
nothing to do with the movie, that’s not what I meant by timing—Selina, think
about when this started, and then look at where they’re
looking. You used the phrase yourself about Florence; you said it hit
close to home.”

“So who do you figure the leak is? Alfred?
Whiskers? You?”

“It’s you, Kitten.”

“…”

“Tonight alone I heard you talking to Richard Flay about a
Della Robbia something in the Bargello. That’s not a museum that many tourists
find, and you’ve been there often enough to know the same obscure pieces as Flay
who lectured at I Tatti for a year. Couple minutes later, you’re telling
me about some spot near Cahors, ‘without a native driving you’ll never find the
turn.’ You’ve got earrings from this obscure shop in Venice that nobody’s ever
heard of—”

“Madison has,” Selina cut in, feeling defensive but unsure
why.

“Madison is the second-best detective in the city. That’s
why I hired her.”

“…”

“Have you two made a lunch date yet?” he asked in a
Bat-gravel that eerily echoed the timing and cadence of the Fop.

“Not… lunch...” Selina said, reeling from this second
occasion on this roof when the man in the mask had spoken in a voice she’d never
heard before. The first was the night of the Van Gogh revelation, and the
unexpected voice she heard was Bruce. Tonight it was… uh, Batfop? While she
regained her equilibrium from that, her mouth continued on auto-pilot until her
brain could catch up. “We were going to do the next trunk show at Bendel
together and then go see… Wait a minute. Time out. Your Development
Director is the one stalking me with more energy and initiative than that
insane Egyptologist who wanted me to be his Nefertiti reincarnate?”

“No, the searches Barbara uncovered wouldn’t have been
Madison; they would have been her counterparts at other charities trying to
catch up. They know Madison has a head start, having daily access to you at the
Foundation. Selina, don’t you see, the moment you signed off on that first NMK
property becoming a thrift store for the Cancer Society, you became a whale for
the professional fundraiser.”

“…”

“And the non-professionals who are simply board members for
this cause or that. They’ll have reclassified you too, but they’ll be a lot
more circumspect. They won’t want to risk offending Bruce Wayne or alienating
the Foundation, so they won’t just ask you to write a check. There will always
be some slant, some reason that makes you the perfect person to go to for
this, so it doesn’t seem like poaching. If it’s for an animal sanctuary or
saving the snow leopards, that’s easy, but if it’s ‘landmines’ or ‘cleft palate’
they’ll have to get creative. Maybe the event is a wine tasting, and of course
they know you’re so knowledgeable about wine. Or there’s a jazz artist
performing at the event who they know you’re fond of, or maybe they’re
auctioning off this wonderful book on the Art of Florence, so of course they
thought of you.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as just a little hypocritical that
you've got Wayne Tech trying to lock down exactly the kind of things the
Wayne Foundation is digging up on people?”

“World of difference between you researching someone to
find out what they have that’s worth stealing and Madison—”

“Researching me to steal the 21st Street lot for
the Foundation when it’s already earmarked for the Junior League? It’s not
all that different, Stud. If it was, my respect for Madison would have gone
down just now instead of up.”

“Impossible woman,” Batman muttered.

“Whatever. But why not tell me?! If you knew this was
coming, why not give a girl a little advanced warning instead of—”

“If Oracle had brought this to me like she should have,
maybe I would’ve, but—”

“Whoa! ‘Maybe you would have,’ we’ll do later. And the original question of why you didn’t tell me when you were expecting it
absent any word from ‘Oracle,’ we’ll also postpone for later. Barbara
brought this to me, I’m guessing because she has this crazy idea that
since it’s my life and not yours, I’m the interested party here.
What part of that isn’t making it through the graphite headgear?”

“Oracle works for me. Monitoring queries about you is an
operation she undertook at my—”

“Because you’re a presumptuous controlling jackass. We all
know it, it’s a cost of doing business within a country mile of you, but you do
not—”

“—own protection, not to mention long range—”

“—thinking you can treat people like a computer program
with—”

“—out any regard for what it would mean to the people who
care about you—”

“—and actually going to say ‘It’s Selina’s life but she
isn’t the one who initiated the query at the c-prompt, so I can’t disclose—”

“—the stock dropping a quarter point just be—”

“—cause she’s a person not an ATM that will only spit out—”

“—wedding invitations instead of diamond cat—”

“—pin code is the only way to get it—”

“—after all we accomplished with the town halls, it’s a
gift!”

“—pon yourself to dictate how my life’s going to be, I’ll
thank you not to screw up quite so spectacula—Wait. The what of the what now?”

“It’s a gift,” he repeated, his arm out, palm up, with an
‘isn’t it obvious’ gesture. “After all we went through with the town halls to
make the stockholders see your relationship with Bruce Wayne in the proper
light, to now have you seen as the white whale on the charity circuit…”

“Would you please stop using that word? Literary
allusion or casino slang, I do not like being referred to as a whale that many
times in one conversation.”

“Ohhh,” Selina said, a long, low breath of recognition
drawing the simple word out for three syllables. “You… controlling,
manipulative, son of a… protocol.” The last word could have been shouted,
instead it was barely above a whisper. “You planned this. You scheming
bastard. You planned this from the beginning. You didn’t take just any shield
company that was handy to grab up all those Falcone properties, you did this
deliberately as...what, as Town Hall 2.0!? You don’t even want to marry me,
you’re just too much of a control freak to stomach the market having an opinion
on the idea.”

“I w—”

“The autocrat that won’t let Superman second guess his
judgment is going to teach Saul Drescher of the Financial Times a lesson.”

“I won’t pretend I’m not capable of—”

“And Lucius’s thing—I BELIEVED YOU! You told me you didn’t
plan that setup, and I actually believed… But you were just packaging ‘Selina’s
a jewel thief’ as a WayneTech asset for the fucking stockholders!?”

“NOT CAPABLE,” Bruce repeated the last words to regain the
floor over her interruption, “of planning and executing a protocol ten times as
complicated as the one you’ve laid out, nor will I apologize for that ability as
if it’s a character flaw, nor will I pretend I don’t consider this to be a
desirable outcome, nor will I apologize for that opinion. I will just—”

“Deny that you did it.”

“I didn’t,” he graveled with I’m-Batman finality.

Selina paused, cocked her hip at particular angle that
harkened back to long ago rooftops. Her head tilted to match it, and the voice,
when she spoke, was the taunting purr of old Bat/Cat confrontations.

“You don’t think that voice makes it more credible, do
you?” she said mockingly. “Considering everything you used to deny in
that tone. Do I need to remind you?”

“Could we stay on the original subject, please? I have
told you that I did not put your name on NMK Holdings or use that company for
the Falcone acquisitions as part of a protocol.”

“And I don’t believe you,” Catwoman answered.

“I can’t help that; it’s the truth. That’s what exists
whether you believe in it or not. Perhaps you’re thinking of Tinkerbell.”

A sputtered laugh escaped her, and Selina hastily brought
her hand to her mouth to cover it. Another convulsive giggle followed. Then
she got control of herself, and looked up at him. She was still murderously
angry, and his deadpan scowl made her angrier. But the markedly unBatmany
expression that had just popped out of Batman was… funny.

“Tinkerbell?” she managed. Batman’s deadliest death-glare
was the only answer, and Selina took a deep breath. She glanced down into the
Pop Art gallery, and happened to see a Warhol-style silkscreen of Batman
scowling in four different color palettes. “Okay,” she said wearily. “Let’s
say … strictly for the sake of not putting a cat-scratch on Batman’s cheek that
Bruce would find hard to explain tomorrow… that I believe you. How long does
this unplanned and non-protocol-induced gift being profiled and
cyber-stalked by the PLUs continue?”

“Right now, you’re fresh meat,” Batman said in Bruce’s
everyday non-fop tone. “The intrusive searches, the aggressive contacts, that
will all subside after a month or two. Then it will surge like it does for
everybody in November, drop off
in January, hiccup briefly in May, July and September.”

“Okay, well, thanks for the advance warning, jackass.”

Batman grunted.

“There is one more thing I wanted to talk about,” he said.
“So much has happened with the Pelacci wedding and Bane and the Rogue War, I
barely had a chance to think it through myself, let alone mention it to you. I
realize it’s not ideal timing, but since you brought it up and… we’re here…”

I found myself thinking about Jervis. I’ve only been
hatted once, and I don’t remember a second of it. As soon as the headpiece
brushed against my temple, everything frizzled into white nothingness. That’s
the typical experience, but I understand there are variations. He has different
devices inducing different mental states, depending on what he needs you to do.
One of those states can, allegedly, produce fantastically detailed dream worlds
based on fantastically implausible premises. I really hoped this wasn’t one,
but I was starting to wonder. It seemed the only explanation for the waves of
nonsense buffeting me since Bruce grabbed me for that dance.

Or maybe I did hope that was the explanation. I knew it
wasn’t; Jervis was in Arkham. But as a way to make sense of it all, it seemed,
I don’t know, so much simpler.

“Since you brought it up,” Batman was
saying.

I had no idea what. I certainly hadn’t ‘brought up’ anything connected to the Pelacci
wedding, Bane or the Rogue war. Or anything connected to the MoMA roof and its
special significance in our past.

“I had a bit of an epiphany when I went to Atlantis,”
came next. And before I could even add ‘Or Atlantis’ to my thought, he’d
gone on to Mongolia. “That time Ra’s kidnapped you just to, to get my
attention…”

“Well nobody ever said he wasn’t a dick,” I murmured, but
all I could think was ‘Mongolia now!?’

“…Aida has never been one of my favorite opera and my mind
wandered…”

So, let’s take it down: the MoMA roof, the Pelacci-Marcuso
wedding, Bane, the Rogue War, Atlantis, Mongolia and Aida. I think I can
be excused for wondering if rascally little Jervis hadn’t got himself an early
release from Arkham, snuck up behind me, and given me a hard shove through the
looking glass.

And I was still furious with him—with Bruce or Batman or
Bat-Fop or whatever the hell he was turning into now—which made it all quite
hard to process:

“I remember thinking about that night at the other
museum, when it started. That first burglary after Cat-Tales, in the Egyptian
wing. You were so… beautiful and exciting—and funny—I let myself smile at something
you said and…”

And that sounds like I was down the rabbit hole,
doesn’t it?! That’s just not the kind of thing Batman says on a museum rooftop,
even that one.

“Then years later, there we were, sitting in front of
that Van Gogh and… talking about marriage. It was all so tied up with…
mortality, the fear of losing you on that flight to Mongolia, the muscle
failure that night in the cave, and then the mindwipe and hell month and…”

“Bruce, you said that you didn’t have a chance to ‘think
this though’ yourself, so maybe you should just wait and go do that, because
whatever it is you’re trying to say to me, it’s just not coming through—”

“I was wrong. The… sick dread I felt at the
vaguest allusion to marriage, I thought it came—Selina, don’t you see, I thought
it was tied up with ideas of death because of Crime Alley. And it wasn’t. It
came from Ra’s.”

“Bruce, you’re talking about a guy whose best idea in the
last ten years was to steal a bunch of yours. You can’t honestly think he’s
capable of that kind of mindfuck.”

“No, not intentionally. But these associations were
formed in the course of that kidnap plot of his, and I simply cannot allow Ra’s
al Ghul to have that kind of influence over my life.”

I nodded, because he obviously felt very strongly about all this,
and because getting the idea out at all seemed up there with passing a kidney
stone.

“Well, good then,” I said, nodding again.

“Good then,” he echoed.

That was followed by a strained silence.

Anywhere else it would have felt like he was waiting for
something, but on a museum roof, it felt like the old tension. Back then,
in the split second when his arm would start to move, I could feel
it: there was a battle raging in there, whether that hand would go to the
belt and reach for the batcuffs or stretch out to wrap around my waist and take me into his arms. It was a thrilling
tension, then.

Tonight, it felt like vertigo.

Then it peaked into absolutely nothing.

“We should tell Alfred first,” he said. “Then have the
kids over. And right after that, I’ll tell Clark, because he’ll know the
second he sees—”

I’m not sure how it happened, but I had my fingers curled
around the whip handle before I caught myself. Bruce’s voice faded into
sort of a head cold kind of pressure pushing outward, and my heartbeat was
thumping uncomfortably loud and heavy, considering I wasn’t doing anything
physical.

“Stop right there,” I breathed against that really
uncomfortable chest tension. “I am going to ask you nicely to stop right there,
because if you don’t, you will be cut off by a whipcrack, is that clear?”

“What’s wr—”

“IS THAT CLEAR?”

“Selina, get a hold of yourse—”

-Whipcrack-

And I’m not sorry.

I did warn him.

He glared.

He was obviously pissed. But he made that hand-raise
gesture, so I knew I had the floor.

“Sorry,” I said, putting the whip away with an equally
exaggerated but conciliatory gesture, because I really did feel we better get
the temperature down quickly. Also, my heartbeat was still too thumpy and my
breathing too heavy to want to get into a full scratch-off with Batman. “Are
you… under the impression—I don’t believe I’m even asking this—Bruce, are you
under the impression that you just proposed?”

“I said that I had an epiphany—”

“Y-yes, that you hadn’t had a chance to mention to me. And then you started a story about Ra’s. Now, I realize that we are not
the most conventional couple in the world, and I’m really not the kind of woman
who needs a gazebo and a red rose and the whole down-on-one-knee thing. But
‘I can’t allow Ra’s al Ghul to have that kind of influence over my life’?!
Really? Ra’s al Ghul, that’s a name you think belongs in this conversation?”

“I SAID that I hadn’t thought through exactly how to
broach—”

“Right! You have protocols for Poison Ivy attacking the
Beatrice Inn with bamboo and King Snake smuggling credit card blanks into
Chinatown inside fake Gucci bags, but you decide to just mention to me
that your views on marriage have changed, since I brought it up and we’re
here! Not like it’s anything important. You’ll wing it. ‘Bane. Ra’s.
The Rogue War.’ You’ve already got the fix in with the stockholders and the
social register. Telling me is just a formality after all.”

“Well uhy—” I heard, and I could see it. I could see
it. He was going to say ‘Uh, yes.’ I don’t know when I’ve felt so, so…
cheap.

He did stop himself from actually saying it out loud.

Un-valued.

But we have a long history of knowing each other’s
thoughts.

Disrespected.

Some of it happened right on this roof, in fact.

And most of all: taken for granted.

“So you figured, what, that I’d be flattered by this? You
‘changed your mind’ so it’s Christmas morning for Kitty.”

“I thought it’s what you wanted. You said—”

“That night, yes. In a weak moment, downstairs by the Van
Gogh, I did want it—for all the wrong reasons. You said it yourself: it
was about mortality. For me too. It was fear. It was the mindwipe, I was
feeling vulnerable—that you were vulnerable and we were—and maybe
getting married was a way to, I don’t know, make it feel more… solid, permanent…
something.

“And okay maybe that’s not the healthiest reason in the
world to want to be man and wife, but it’s a damn sight better than ‘Ra’s al
Ghul cannot be allowed to have that kind of influence in my life.’”

“Fine, I shouldn’t have mentioned Ra’s,” he said—with all
the piercing insight of ‘I don’t think those jewels belong to you.’

“I salute you, World’s Greatest Detective,” I spat
reflexively.

“I’m sorry I asked,” he spat back.

“You didn’t,” I pointed out.

And he hadn’t.

Maybe it was all the talk about my past. My roommate at
Miss Corinne’s loved Pride and Prejudice. She had the entire text of
Eliza Bennet’s refusal to Mr. Darcy memorized. I wished I remembered more of
it. All I could recall right then was that the pompous jackass “spoke of
apprehension and anxiety but his countenance expressed real security.” i.e. He
was the catch of the county, he knew it, and there wasn’t a chance in the world
of any semi-lucid woman saying no. But even he went through the motions. It’s
the rudest proposal in English Literature, and even he bothered to ask the
question and pretend he was anxious about the answer.

I would have mentioned it, but even though I didn’t hear
him fire the line, I knew there was only empty roof behind me.

He had gone.

The “apartment” the Colemans had bought from Sweetzer
Platt’s widow in 1988 was, in fact, three full floors of a Yorke Street
high-rise, consisting of forty-one rooms. Geoff Coleman had ingeniously converted
the bottom floors into studios and one-bedroom flats, resold them, and recouped
the entire purchase price with enough left over to furnish the remaining rooms
in regal style. In Bruce Wayne’s circle, however, it was still called “Justine
Platt’s apartment.” To the insurance company, it was simply called “The Nightmare.” Ninety
windows altogether. Thirty on the top floor where the Colemans’ palatial
residence was protected by the first-rate security of Foster and Forsythe. Sixty identical windows below where the affluent residents weren’t quite in that
league. Sixty windows where a skilled would-be thief might practice.

In the hours before dawn, as Geoff and Lily Coleman were
sleeping off the Tattinger from the Wayne Foundation Fire Ball, one of those
windows was breached. A silent figure moved through the rooms with the
instincts of an accomplished thief. In less than three minutes, the Colemans’
safe was located. In less than fifteen it was cracked. And in less than twenty
the figure was gone, along with $175,000 in jewelry, $196,000 in bearer bonds,
and a miniature of “The Spice Merchant’s Wife” that had hung low over the table
inside the foyer where the invitation to the next Wayne gala sat in the mail
tray.